RUSS DUERSTINE: Open letter to GOP candidates

SAN ANGELO, Texas - As Tom Green County GOP chairman and state Republican executive committeeman, I respectfully submit this open letter to all Republican candidates for the Texas House of Representatives.

As you know, countless time, energy and money from your base of Republican volunteers likely will bring a historic victory this year, and will increase your Republican majority in the Texas House.

The overwhelming victorious majority that you and your fellow elected Republicans are likely to enjoy has come because we have faith in your campaign promises to make our state and country as strong as it can be with common sense conservative principles.

These principles worked well for Texas when we first gained the majority, and it is what voters expect from us if we want to continue to gain a majority of their votes. Failure to pursue these principles is the key reason Tea Party activists are almost as upset with us as they are with the Democrats.

With the political power at your disposal to make fundamental improvements to our state by implementing traditional common sense conservative solutions, it is imperative that this opportunity not be squandered.

This may be the last chance Republican elected leaders have to prove to the voters that we will vigorously pursue and pass legislation that a majority of Texans desire and that Democrats successfully frustrated last legislative session.

With the significant amount of majority strength you likely will enjoy, the only way the Democrats can frustrate the will of the people is to get key committee chairmanships and individual appointments to those committees and bottle up key legislation in those important committees.

Their cry for bipartisanship is merely a weapon when they are in the minority, and is not sincere at all. Democrats have denied Texans straight up-or-down votes on key issues like voter photo ID by using extreme procedural methods like filibustering through “chubbing” at the end of last session.

Who can forget they broke quorum and ran off to Oklahoma to prevent another up-or-down vote on redistricting. They were happy to shirk their responsibility in drawing the lines like the state constitution calls for and to turn it over to the courts.

This again would have denied the people the right to govern themselves through their elected representatives.

Therefore the Texas House speaker selection is the pivotal linchpin to the Democratic Party’s plans to frustrate the will of the majority and ultimately destroy the Texas Republican Party that represents them.

It is not a matter of WHO the Republican House speaker is as much as it is a matter of HOW that speaker is selected. Any attempt to select the speaker outside of a Republican caucus will empower Democrats to bargain for and get the very positions they need to gum up the committee process and frustrate popular conservative legislation.

The only way to ensure that this doesn’t happen is to caucus together when selecting your speaker candidate. Empowering Democrats during this process will not be understood or accepted by the voters who have trusted you to save our state and country from our current crisis.

This does not deny Democrats the ability to engage in the process and to debate key issues of the day. However, it does make it harder for them to deny the citizens of Texas the up-or-down vote on the key issues of our day.

Do we really want important issues like border security, voter fraud, fair redistricting, responsible government spending and other key issues to be killed in committee and not voted on like last session?

Last session saw 11 Republicans break off from our slim majority and negotiate with Democrats to select the new speaker. Regardless if the need for change was legitimate or not, the net result was to empower the minority to act as the majority.

This cannot be allowed to happen again if we are to survive as the majority party in Texas.

Some have said that to embrace the State Republican Executive Committee resolution calling for a Republican caucus is insulting to one or more of the speaker candidates. This cannot and should not be insulting to any Republican who does not need help from a majority bloc of Democrats to win the race.

To insist that this is an insult is an admission of such a fact and leaves that speaker candidate beholden to the Democrats for his position, thus compromising all of us.

The choice of speaker from within your caucus will enable that speaker to be empowered to pursue the majority will of Texans, regardless of your choice. Then it will be up to us as grass roots party leaders to support and cheerlead your choice, and give you every bit of encouragement and political strength we can muster this legislative session.